The news that the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City will close in September sent my mind racing back to the day almost three decades ago when my wife and I visited.

The news that the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City will close in September sent my mind racing back to the day almost three decades ago when my wife and I visited it — and I won the biggest prize I ever expect to win.

It was March of 1985, and Atlantic City was newly minted as a competitor to the casinos in Las Vegas. Hard as it is to believe today, Nevada and New Jersey were the only places in the United States that allowed casino gambling. And except for a stop in a nearly empty gambling palace in Aruba during our off-season honeymoon the year before, neither my bride nor I had ever been to a casino.

So we decided to take a bus tour down to Atlantic City to see what all the fuss was about.

On the way down, we sang songs led by a sturdy woman who was our guide. And when we got to the Trump Plaza — then Harrah’s Trump Plaza — she handed out forms to fill in, entering a drawing whose top prize was a trip for two to London, Paris and Rome.

“Someone’s got to win,” she said. “It might as well be you.”

So we dutifully put the forms in the two-story-high bin as we walked into the casino’s lobby. And then we forgot about them.

The Trump Plaza, to tell you the truth, was pretty forgettable, too. More vivid in my memory were the boardwalk, still pretty despite Atlantic City’s plunge as a tourist destination, and the slums we found — and quickly left — just a couple of blocks past the shiny casinos, toward the city’s ravaged downtown.

And, of course, the rundown hotel nearby where we stayed on the tour company’s cheapest plan. There, a sudden surge of hot water during my shower nearly left me with burn marks in places I very much wouldn’t have wanted them.

Two days after our return from Atlantic City, my phone rang in The Journal’s newsroom. Someone on the other end asked for me, then told me I’d won the European trip.

I thanked her and got a few details. Then, skeptical as any reporter ought to be, I called long-distance information for the casino’s phone number (no Internet to hand it to me), and phoned just to make sure someone wasn’t pulling my leg.

“Oh, no, it’s really true,” said the nice woman at the casino’s office. It was April 2; she said they’d avoided calling the winners the day before so people wouldn’t think it was an April Fools’ prank.

The trip, when we took it a few months later, was the kind of European tour a pair of young newlyweds never could have afforded.

A long, black limo picked us up from our little Dutch Colonial in Warwick’s Gaspee Plateau and swept us up to Logan. At every stop, we were met by a car and driver who helped us through customs, then took us to our hotel.

Those were four-star hotels in prime locations, from London’s Hyde Park to a spot a half-block off the Champs Élysées in Paris. We traded a few days in Rome for the same number of days in a cliffside hotel overlooking the Mediterranean in Monte Carlo, having decided the Riviera was too romantic to miss. And when we asked to add on a week at our own expense in Germany, where my wife’s best friend was stationed in the Army, our accommodating hosts not only agreed, but flew us to Munich, and back to Boston from there.

Sightseeing, tickets to West End plays and the Folies-Bergère, and dinners in fine restaurants — all were on Donald Trump.

It’s the reason I still don’t speak ill of The Donald, whatever his eccentricities of haircut or politics. He sent me to Europe — in style.

Now the Trump Plaza is set to close. The hotel Donald built for $210 million in 1984 couldn’t fetch $20 million today, in Atlantic City’s crumbling casino scene. It’s among four of the city’s dozen casinos that may be closed by the end of the year.

In the last three decades, my wife and I have been to a number of casinos, from Connecticut to Monaco. None of them struck us as very exciting or glamorous, I’m sorry to say. Even in Monte Carlo 29 years ago, there was a definite shortage of women in ball gowns and men playing baccarat in tuxedos.

As for the Trump Plaza, I’m sure closing it makes sense economically. And its fall may be a cautionary tale to those looking to casino gambling for economic salvation, as Atlantic City once did. (I’m looking at you, Massachusetts. And Newport.)

But I can’t help hearing the news with regret.

To me, the Trump Plaza is a token of my youth — the place where, once, I made my big score.